Entertainment

Ed Ruscha shares his most cherished object, and another side of himself

Published

2 years ago

August 7, 2024

Ed Ruscha shares his most cherished object, and another side of himself

Ed Ruscha loves plants. If you know his art, this fact might come unexpected. He’s not a landscape artist. He’s never wanted to paint a plant. “I’m not sure why,” he says from behind the large desk in his Culver City studio. And yet he’s been gardening for some 50 years.

We’re looking together at two wooden planks with metal tags hammered into them. Each tag once belonged to a plant that has died, the shiny metal carved with the name of the plant, the date of its death and sometimes its cause: “Passed away / Oct. ’87 / Just dried up.”

“They’re like little epitaphs for the departed,” Ruscha says. At the top of one board, he has written: Trees and Plants that Didn’t Make It.

He grows his plants out in the desert, in the Yucca Valley, where he has a cabin. Ruscha “found out the hard way” which plants survive in the arid climate with sand storms and even snow. “I should know better than to plant a palm tree in the high desert.” He looks straight at me with his blue eyes, then smiles, briefly.

Ruscha creates a tag each time he acquires a plant, a label to remember its species, and then pokes it into the ground for as long as the plant will last. He enjoys the process of tending to his plants, protecting them from raccoons with barriers made of wire. He likes the challenge of seeing if he “can make something survive,” especially something “as delicate as a plant.”

For 50 years, Ruscha has been making "little epitaphs" for his plants whenever they die.

I ask Ruscha if it makes him sad when a plant dies. “Yeah, I shed a tear,” he says — earnestly, I think. “A quick tear. And then it gets posted to the board here.” He keeps the boards leaning against the wall in his studio. “I check it out and nod at it every so often to let it know I care about it,” he tells me. “And I’m getting smiles in response” — his eucalyptus, mulberries and bird of paradise appreciating him in the afterlife.

The more I sit with Ruscha’s epitaphs, the less unexpected his love for plants becomes. Time, after all, is the artist’s great subject.

Ruscha’s life-spanning retrospective currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is called “Now Then,” evoking his black-and-white lithograph of the phrase “That was then, this is now” lit up against dark clouds. His pictures declare the way things evolve and age, from a dramatic painting of the words “The End” to images of everyday, discarded things, like a torn mattress or broken pencil.

Ruscha tells me about his blazing red 1983 painting with the words “The Study of Friction and Wear on Mating Surfaces.” He makes the connection: “You could almost say the wind is a mating surface of a plant. And that intrigues me and probably motivates me.”

This idea of motivation comes up, subtly, throughout our conversation. At 86, the drive to keep his plants alive, and his sense of purpose in caring for their death, keeps him going.

a metal tag that reads: “PASSED AWAY OCT. ’87 JUST DRIED UP”

I ask Ruscha if he considers himself nostalgic. “I like remembering the past and the way things used to be,” he answers, establishing a gentle, precise distinction. He’s made a ritual of going out in Los Angeles and noticing how the landscape has changed. “I compartmentalize the way the city looked at one time,” he says, which, when he moved here in the 1950s, was like “some kind of antique village.”

Most famously, Ruscha has been photographing every block of Sunset Boulevard since the 1960s, marking the gradual disappearance of buildings, honoring street corners as his tags do for his trees. “I should have been tagging all these buildings too!” he suddenly realizes. “But we’ll let the graffiti artists tag.”

“I like remembering the past and the way things used to be,” says Ruscha.

Ruscha is not against change per se, but he’s found the need to notice it. It’s an act of observation, rather than an indulgence in longing — an exercise in remembering, an effort to place things within a continuum.

Nonetheless, change can be tiring, and Ruscha seeks a break from it by going to the desert. It’s a contrast to his life in L.A.; he doesn’t see people in the desert, and, unlike a city, it’s mostly changeless. Its rocks have been there for thousands of years. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that it’s in this stubborn landscape where Ruscha has chosen to grow his garden, where plants try to thrive against all odds, their cycle of life and death against a seemingly stable backdrop.

“It’s not just the plants that I like, but it’s the labeling,” Ruscha shares with me about his board. He excitedly explains how he etches the tags with a metal machine. “They’re not going anywhere. … These are permanent.” Like the desert to the city, the tags are the comforting counterpoints to his plants, changeless.

When people think of Ruscha’s art, they think of how iconically L.A. it is — his painted Hollywood signs, sleek gas stations and swimming pools. But it’s also iconically the desert. His art — and I include these humble wooden planks — has the energy of a desert, of those rocks that persist. I think it’s in the sharp light, in the way things get fixed.

a metal tag that reads: “Mondell FEB. 16, 1978”

Ruscha, who grew up in Oklahoma, moved to L.A. when he was 18 years old and hasn’t left since. He’s found himself having to explain why he didn’t move to a bigger art center like New York City and chose, instead, to stay. It’s “the feeling of California,” he tells me — “including its vegetation.” In describing the cactuses and the palm trees, he notes “the laciness of it all. … It has a magic to it that attracted me.”

While at his studio, he walks me back to his second garden, the concrete backyard that once upon a time was an orange grove. He shows me a row of Joshua trees sprouting in pots, which he plans to take with him to the desert. Holding on to his two wooden planks, he sits among kumquat and lime trees. With his all-blue outfit and bright white hair and eyebrows, he has his own magic laciness about him.

With his all-blue outfit and bright white hair and eyebrows, Ruscha has his own magic laciness about him.

“You know, I think I get emotional progress, emotional propulsion, from plants,” he tells me. By the end of our time together, I’m getting used to how he casually utters such profound statements. I’m with the softer side of an artist known for having the cool, edgy swagger of his art, the side that propels him to paint large canvases of cracks in the sidewalk and that declare “The End” of things. It’s the side of him that picks up a basket of kumquats and limes and distributes them, one by one, into a paper bag for me to take home. It’s his nature-loving side, seemingly behind the scenes, driving how he creates and lives.

“I feel powerfully connected to that board,” Ruscha concludes. “[A] lot of plants have died, but they all are sort of reminders to me — once with me and now departed. So that’s OK.”

Photo Assistant Cody Rogers

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Here comes “THE BRIDE!”, audacious and wild – Rue Morgue

Published

5 hours ago

March 5, 2026

Press Room

Movie Review: Here comes “THE BRIDE!”, audacious and wild – Rue Morgue

That’s both a promise and a challenge she delivers, since what follows may rub some viewers the wrong way. Yet Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle commitment to her vision is compelling in and of itself, and she has marshalled an absolutely smashing-looking and -sounding production. The story proper begins in 1936 Chicago, which, like everything and everyplace else in the movie, has been luminously shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher and sumptuously conjured by production designer Karen Murphy. Her involvement is appropriate given that her previous credits include Bradley Cooper’s A STAR IS BORN and Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, since among other things, THE BRIDE! is a nostalgic musical. Its Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who has taken the name of his maker, is obsessed with big-screen tuners, and imagines himself in elaborate song-and-dance numbers. (Considering the reception to JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, one must applaud the daring of Warner Bros. for greenlighting another expensive film in which a tormented protagonist has that kind of fantasy life.)

THE BRIDE! may be revisionist on many levels, but its characterization of its “monster” holds true to past screen incarnations from Karloff’s to Elordi’s: His scarred appearance masks a lonely soul who desires companionship. Frankenstein has arrived in Chicago to seek out Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), correctly believing she has the scientific know-how to create an appropriate mate for him. Rather than piece one together, Dr. Euphronious resurrects the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), whose consorting with underworld types led to her brutal death. Previously chafing against the man’s world she inhabited in life, she becomes even more defiant and unruly as a revenant, apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley herself, declaiming in free-associative sentences and quoting rebellious literature.

Buckley, currently an Oscar favorite for her very different literary-inspired role in HAMNET, tears into the role of the Bride (who now goes by the name Penny) with invigorating abandon that bursts off the screen. Unsure of her identity yet overflowing with self-confident bravado, she’s the opposite of the sensitive “Frank,” but they’re united by the world that stands against them. That becomes literal when a violent incident sends them on the lam, road-tripping to New York City and beyond, on a trail inspired by the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), Frank’s favorite song-and-dance-man star.

With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal has made a film that’s at once her very own and a feverish homage to all sorts of cinema past and present. It’s a horror story, a lovers-on-the-run movie, a crime thriller, a musical and more, and historical fealty be damned if it makes for a good scene (as when Penny and Frank sneak into a 3D movie over a decade before such features became popular). In-references are everywhere: It might just be a coincidence that the couple’s travels take them past Fredonia, NY (cf. “Freedonia” in the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP), but it’s certainly no accident that the former Ida is targeted by a crime boss named Lupino, referencing the actress and pioneering filmmaker whose works included noirs and women’s-issues stories. Penny’s exploits lead legions of admiring women to adopt her look and anarchic attitude, echoing the first JOKER (while a headline calls them “Twisted Sisters”), and the use of one Irving Berlin song in a Frankensteinian context immediately recalls a classic comedic take on the property.

Whether the audience should be put in mind of a spoof at a key point in a film with different goals is another matter. At times like these, Gyllenhaal’s pastiche ambitions overtake emotional investment in the story. As strong as the two lead performances are (Bale is quite moving, conveying a great deal of soul from behind his extensive prosthetics), it’s easier to feel for them in individual scenes than during the entire course of the just-over-two-hour running time. The diversions can be entertaining, to be sure, but they also result in an uncertainty of tone. The dissonance continues straight through to the end, where the filmmaker’s choice of closing-credits song once again suggests we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously.

There’s nonetheless much to admire and enjoy about THE BRIDE!, and this kind of risk-taking by a major studio is always to be encouraged (especially considering that we’ll see how long that lasts at Warner Bros. once Paramount takes it over). Beyond the terrific work by the aforementioned actors, there’s fine support from Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives on Penny and Frank’s heels, with Sandy Powell’s lavish costumes and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s rich, varied score vital to fashioning this fully imagined world. Kudos also to makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and to Chris Gallaher and Scott Stoddard, who did those honors on Frank, for their visceral, evocative work. Uneven as it may be, THE BRIDE! is also as alive! as any film you’ll likely see this year.

Entertainment

These 3 Disney movie songs, animated with sign language, are headed to Disney+

Published

7 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

These 3 Disney movie songs, animated with sign language, are headed to Disney+

New animated sequences of songs from “Encanto,” “Frozen 2” and “Moana 2” are headed to Disney+.

Disney Animation announced Wednesday that “Songs in Sign Language,” comprised of three musical numbers from recent Disney movies newly reimagined in American Sign Language, will debut April 27 in honor of National Deaf History Month.

Directed by veteran Disney animator Hyrum Osmond, “Songs in Sign Language” will feature fresh animation for “Encanto’s” chart-topper “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” “Frozen 2’s” poignant ballad “The Next Right Thing” and “Moana 2’s” anthem “Beyond.” Produced by Heather Blodget and Christina Chen, the new versions of these songs were created in collaboration with L.A.-based theater company Deaf West Theatre.

“In the majority of cases, we created entirely new animation,” Osmond said in a press statement. “There were a lot of adjustments that we had to do within the animation to be true to the original intention.”

Deaf West Theatre artistic director DJ Kurs, sign language reference choreographer Catalene Sacchetti and a group of eight performers from Deaf West worked together to craft and choreograph the ASL version of the musical numbers for “Songs in Sign Language.” The creatives focused on being true to the concepts and emotion of the songs rather than direct translations of the lyrics.

Kurs said his team jumped at the chance to collaborate and integrate ASL into “the fabric of Disney storytelling.”

“Disney stories are the universal language of childhood,” Kurs said in a statement. “The chance to bring our language into that world was a historic opportunity to reach a global audience. Working on this project was very emotional. For so long, we have known and loved the artistic medium of Disney Animation. Here, the art form was adapting to us. I hope this unlocks possibilities in the minds and hearts of Deaf children, and that this all leads to more down the road.”

Osmond, who led a team of more than 20 animators on this project, said animation was the perfect medium to showcase sign language, which he described as “one of the most beautiful ways of communication on Earth.” The director, whose father is deaf, also saw this project as an opportunity to connect with the Deaf community.

“Growing up, I never learned sign language, and that barrier prevented me from really connecting with my dad,” Osmond said. “This reimagining of Disney Animation musical numbers helps bring down barriers and allows us to connect in a special way with our audiences in the Deaf community. I’m grateful that the Studio got behind making something so impactful.”

Movie Reviews

Maxime Giroux – ‘In Cold Light’ movie review

Published

18 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

Maxime Giroux – ‘In Cold Light’ movie review

(Credits: Far Out / Elevation Pictures)

Wed 4 March 2026 9:30, UK

Maxime Giroux – ‘In Cold Light’

The action is relentless in the complex thriller In Cold Light, a tense combination of crime and fugitive tale and family drama. It is the third feature and first English language film by Maxime Giroux, best known for a very different kind of film, the critically acclaimed 2014 drama Felix & Meira.

The tension and high energy of In Cold Light almost overwhelm the film, but are relieved, barely, by moments of character development and introspection that keep the audience pulling for the restrained and outwardly cold main character.

Speaking at the film’s Canadian premiere, director Giroux admitted he found creating an action film a challenge. Part of his approach was using very minimal dialogue, especially for the central character, letting the action speak for itself, and allowing silence to intensify suspense. Giroux has said he likes the lack of dialogue and speaks highly of the importance of silence in cinema; he prefers using “physical aspects of communication” in his films.

Young Ava Bly (Maika Monroe) is a competent and businesslike drug dealer, working in partnership with her brother Tom (Jesse Irving) and a small team. As the film begins, Ava has just been released from a brief prison sentence. She is hoping to return to her former position, but her brother’s associates consider her a risk due to her recent incarceration. While she works to re-establish herself, a shocking encounter with a corrupt police officer sends Ava’s life into chaos and forces her to go on the run.

Ava’s fugitive experience introduces a new character, to whom Ava turns for help: her father, Will Bly, played by Troy Kotsur, known for his excellent performance in CODA. Their first interaction is handled in a fascinating way, as Will is deaf and the two communicate through sign language. This, of course, provides another form of the silent interaction the director prefers; he explained that much of the father-daughter interaction was rewritten with the actor in mind. Their conflict is nicely expressed through a scene in which their initial conversation is intermittently cut off by a faulty light which goes out periodically, making communication through sign momentarily impossible, nicely expressing the rift between father and daughter.

As Ava continues to evade danger, her escape becomes complicated by new information, placing her in a painful dilemma. We gradually learn more about Ava, her background, and her character through occasional flashbacks and glimpses of her dreams. The plot becomes more complex and more poignant, and gains features of a mystery as well as an action tale, as she is pressed to choose from among equally unacceptable alternatives.

The climax of her efforts to protect both herself and those close to her comes to a head as she meets with the director of a rival drug gang. Veteran actress Helen Hunt is perfect in the minor but significant role of Claire, the rival drug lord, who plays odd mind games with Ava in an intriguing psychological fencing match. It’s an unusual scene, in which Ava’s personality is made clearer, and Claire’s understated dominance and casual speech do not quite conceal the threat she represents.

The frantic pace and emotional turmoil are enhanced by the camera work, which tends to focus tightly on Ava, and by a harsh, minimal musical score that sets the tone without distracting from the action. Giroux chose to shoot the film in Super 60; he describes digital as “too perfect” for the look he was going for, and since “Ava is rough,” the film portrays her better. The director describes the entire movie as “rough,” in fact, and deliberately chose a dark, washed-out look for much of the footage, occasionally using light and colour, in the form of fireworks, lightning, or a colourful carnival, to both relieve and emphasise the darkness.

The dynamic, intense story holds the attention in spite of the lengthy, sometimes repetitive chase scenes and subdued dialogue. Ava’s predicament, and the difficult decisions she is forced to make, are made surprisingly relatable, from the initial disaster that starts the action to the surprising flash-forward that concludes the film, on as high a note as the situation could allow. Fans of action movies will definitely enjoy this one.